$40,000 ...

Google has told the high court a ruling that it is liable for defamatory material contained in hyperlinked pages will have a ‘devastating’ impact on the internet. Photograph: Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock

For $40,000, rampant censorship, overbearing litigation and technological and economic chaos could ensue if a defamation damages award stands, thanks to a Victoria Supreme Court ruling against Google. 

Google has warned of a “devastating” impact on the internet if a court ruling that the search giant is liable for defamatory material contained in hyperlinked pages is not overturned.

Google warned in a submission to the high court it will be forced to “censor” its search results if a $40,000 defamation damages award to George Defteros, a solicitor who represented Melbourne gangland figures, is allowed to stand.

Defteros successfully sued Google, arguing its publication of search results that included a 2004 article in the Age about his arrest on conspiracy to murder charges – which were later dropped – defamed him.

Lawyers of all stripes are licking their chops on this one.

The game has changed ...

Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard changes more things than it feels possible to comprehend. (Image credit: Microsoft)

Yours truly's not a gamer though the graphics in said games is truly stellar with raytracubg now becoming ubiquitous in order for games to become photorealistic. The size of the industry's much bigger than Hollywood and the impact on society's truly immense but the game (pardons the pun) has changed as seen by an insightful Tech Radar article. 

To whit ...

Microsoft's proposed takeover of Activision Blizzard is currently the black hole that is, if not all-consuming, at least altering the reality of other news in the gaming space. The event horizon that's affecting all else. Even if a news story is unrelated, its specter looms.

It feels like something has changed. The way the industry worked, the size of all the players, the divisions, the interplay between major publishers and console manufacturers, it was all reliable. Predictable. 

The conversations that were had were cyclical because as much as time went on and releases came and went, the players on the board had remained in their relative positions this side of the century.

After Tuesday, it doesn't feel like that anymore. The conversation has become way bigger. These aren't just considerations about consoles or game releases, but more about companies who are trying to shape the way we experience our world. 

To get a sense of perspective regarding gaming market size, here's the revenue breakdown in 2020. 

The gaming industry is now number 2 on the market but still behind the television industry, clearly number 1, mainly due to its immense advertising revenues. However, experts predict that in the future, advertising budgets will be shifted more and more to the Internet (already over 50% of all advertising revenues) at the expense of television.  (Source: statista.com)

As seen per the chart, Movies = $455b while Video games = $1603b.

By 2024, the breakdown goes like this ...

According to forecast data evaluating the state of the global advertising market, in 2021, magazine advertising expenditures accounted for 2.54 percent of total media ad spending that year. Internet held nearly 59 percent of all ad expenditures in 2021.

Fast forward three years and the divide between TV and internet advertising deepens. By the end of 2024 over 65 percent of global advertising spending is expected to fall to internet ads, while TV's share is projected t fall to 21 percent.

Rememberence ... of ice & winter

Suspensions's Bridge

As stated before, yours truly thinks of his granddaughters and the specter of global warming as the world they will see in 2100, much less 2050, will be largely devoid of ice and winter. In some parts of the world, winter's becoming actually worse while summer's akin to boiling frogs but for the US, winter and the notion of ice will soon become yet a fleeting memory, only realized in work similar to what's been created by this artist. With luck, maybe this art will be preserved by my son and grand daughters though digital drift looms where content disappears when a site goes down or a digital library bites the dust, a notion seen all too often in this blog if one takes the time to look. 

This winter's actually cold and ice is plentiful for a change. Why ice, well, it shows how quantum probabilities and inherent chaos combine to create forms of dangerous beauty whenever temps go below 32 degrees.

The Snow Moon

Of Ice & Winter

The Unfolding of Time

100 Seconds to Midnight

Photograph: Jean Pimentel

This powerful pix of an H Bomb blast resonates to no end, both as something most deadly but also of ominous beauty akin, at grand scale, to looking at a Black Widow spider or peering into the eye of a black mamba. With this image in mind, the Doomsday Clock tells us we're 100 seconds to midnight, the time where mankind ends his reign on planet earth via such entities as nuclear war, climate change, malevolent AI and/or other disruptive technologies in other domains.

IN STANLEY KUBRICK’S classic 1964 satire Dr. Strangelove, it just takes one errant general in command of nuclear bombers, plus American and Soviet policies of “mutually assured destruction,” to trigger worldwide catastrophe. The darkly hilarious film dwells on risks that remain today, including the possibility of an automated launch system or a single person with access to nuclear codes bringing about a deadly mushroom cloud.

Chicago-based artist Martyl Langsdorf designed the clock in the wake of World War II, working with her husband Alexander Langsdorf, a Manhattan Project physicist, and other researchers who helped get the fledgling Bulletin off the ground. The Doomsday Clock’s experts have the unenviable job of identifying and weighing potential apocalypses, as well as our progress as a society—or lack of it—in avoiding them. They started the clock when nuclear conflicts were on everyone’s minds following the devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where bombs had killed as many as 210,000 people and injured and sickened many more with cancer-causing radiation. The clock’s minute hand ticked back and forth over the decades, following the development of even more destructive hydrogen bombs, cases of nuclear false alarms, and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, perhaps the most dangerous standoff in history.

In Dr. Strangelove, people engineer devices of their own destruction. One of the general’s B-52 bombers strikes a target in the USSR—only to set off a Soviet “doomsday device” that detonates bombs all over the world. (“It is not a thing a sane man would do. The doomsday machine is designed to trigger itself automatically,” the Russian ambassador says in the movie.) The message of the Bulletin is to inspire the dismantling of such machines, to turn back the clock before it’s too late.

Its initial purpose was to highlight the dangers of nuclear war, but that mission was later expanded to encompass other primarily human-made crises that threaten civilization. Initially set at seven minutes till “midnight,” it’s now perilously set at just 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to the end of humanity. On Thursday, as Bulletin members celebrate the clock’s 75th anniversary, they will update the time again, when it could tick slightly toward or away from the apocalypse.

It is 100 seconds to midnight

Telepresence ... for real

Still a prototype but the tech's impressive and telepresence's no longer just a concept but something actually real. In this writer's opinion, Google's thinking long term with a view of making tech ubiquitous and invisible. AR glasses using the Starline approach is a first step. The question to ask is, Can Google pull it off?

In a new research paper, Google has detailed the tech behind its impressive Project Starline demo from this year’s I/O conference. Project Starline is essentially a 3D video chat booth that aims to replace a one-on-one 2D video conference call with an experience that feels like you’re actually sitting in front of a real human being.

It sounds simple, but Google’s research paper highlights just how many challenges there are in tricking your brain into thinking there’s a real human being sitting just a few feet away from you. Obviously the image needs to be high resolution and free of distracting artifacts, but it also needs to look correct from your relative position in the booth. Audio is another challenge, as the system needs to make it sound like a person’s words are coming from their actual mouth. And then there’s just the small matter of eye-contact.

But, eventually, the hope is that Project Starline could offer a similar feeling of presence as virtual or augmented reality, without users needing to wear bulky headsets or trackers.

The display unit and its various tracking hardware. Image: Google

The system is made up of a backlight unit and display unit. Image: Google

Needless to say, it will take a while to make Starline ubiquitous but the first step has been taken.

Le Voyage Dans la Lune

Le Voyage dan la Lune, a 1902 masterpiece by Georges Méliès, is visionary, charming and absolutely state of the art. Hugo, a loving tribute by Martin Scorsese, adds to just how profound Méliès truly was.  

A Trip to the Moon (French: Le Voyage dans la Lune)[a] is a 1902 French adventure short film directed by Georges Méliès. Inspired by a wide variety of sources, including Jules Verne's 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon and its 1870 sequel Around the Moon, the film follows a group of astronomers who travel to the Moon in a cannon-propelled capsule, explore the Moon's surface, escape from an underground group of Selenites (lunar inhabitants), and return to Earth with a captive Selenite. Its ensemble cast of French theatrical performers is led by Méliès himself as main character Professor Barbenfouillis. The film features the overtly theatrical style for which Méliès became famous.

Title Card

Georges Méliès, c. 1890

Hugo is equally charming as well. 

Note, the film was colorized as the tech for practical color film had not been developed until the 1950's 

Landing on Titan

On unexplored worlds, the sound of science is a harmonious melody of chimes, clicks and mechanical whirrs. At least that’s how one scientist interpreted the January 2005 descent and landing of the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe on Titan.

Mesmerizing says it all ... the Huygens probe landing on Titan.

Rodan returns

 Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock

The graphic depicting The Donald as a rampaging Rodan is apt as the repugs have no answer to Agent Orange. Without a certain sense of irony, network nooze wants him back in the saddle due to the fact Trump's the all time money maker for said networks but for the rest of us, the country can ill afford having this sorry excuse for a human being becoming president yet again but it could just happen given to what's going on as of late in the good ole USA in the year of our lord 2022.

I have no idea if Donald Trump will actually run for president again in 2024. No one does. He could be feigning an intention to mount a campaign in order to maximize his power and fundraising among Republicans between now and the fall of 2023. He might be holding open the possibility of running in case the interminable criminal investigation into his business practices finally comes to head, with New York's attorney general moving forward with an indictment. The overweight 75-year-old former president could have every intention of running and yet die or become incapacitated by a heart attack or stroke between now and Election Day.

It gets better, right?

To see why, let's imagine how the early stages of the contest would unfold. Trump, DeSantis, Pence, and the others are standing together on a debate stage in the fall of 2023. The moderator opens by addressing DeSantis: Donald Trump says the 2020 election was stolen from him and that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president. Do you agree?

What exactly is DeSantis supposed to say in response? One option would be to answer truthfully — which is to say, in the negative: No, the election wasn't stolen, and Biden won fair and square. But this would automatically place DeSantis on the opposite side of that 71 percent of Republicans and open him up to an onslaught of abuse from Trump himself. DeSantis would be labeled a cuck and a weakling who refuses to fight and would let the Democrats get away with murder from Day One of a DeSantis administration.

If, instead, DeSantis offered a tepid endorsement of the election fraud conspiracy, voters will be left to wonder why they should favor that second-best alternative over the man who was personally stabbed in the back and craves vengeance for himself and his party.

Then there's the most standard-issue-politician thing DeSantis could do, which is attempt to skirt the question and pivot to another, less politically perilous topic. But there is zero chance Trump would let him get away with that. He'd merely treat it as a different kind of confirmation that DeSantis is too weak to fight the ruthless Democrats to the death.

Sora no Daikaijū Radon

11 degrees ...

11 degrees, the coldest day yet in '22, allowed water to become ice in record time. :)

Them Changes ... January 16-19, 2022

Northwest Passage :)

Channel Buoy

4PM

4PM CU

Convergence I

 The Wolf Moon