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That the collusion of major corporations in the establishment of a police state is even an issue is the most disappointing thing of all, but 8 years of George Bush & Dick Cheney are about to come to an end. Obama is part of undoing this sick state of affairs.

Granting immunity is a step in the wrong direction. It doesn’t just perpetuate the current state of affairs, it reinforces it. It makes it harder to prosecute past illegal activity, and removes any incentives to avoid participating it in the future.

Presumably Obama is willing to take this position because he thinks it will make him more electable, but its the sort of compromise that makes me think that he’ll be no champion of the constitution if he is elected, that he’ll be too happy to make unacceptable compromises in terms of some other goal.

I am all for compromise in politics, but I think compromising the constitution is a line that should not be crossed. It makes me question other compromises he must make. Will he help expand the ethanol industry, and squander our top-soil and fresh water in the process? Will he support covert or military action in Iran, thereby insuring more blood, treasure, and credibility will be squandered in the middle instead of applied directly to problems at home?

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Hadoop is a project to build an open source version of the infrastruture that Google uses to process data. It provides a huge filesystem that can be distributed over dozens or even thousands of computers (analogous to GFS), as well as support for processing all that data in parallel in the same way Google does when they build and update their index of the web (using MapReduce). It also provides HBase a distributed database that is built on top of the filesytem in the manner of Google’s BigTable. Hadoop is a spin-off of the Nutch project to build an opensource search engine that could index a significant portion of the web.

Most of the work on Hadoop and HBase has been supported by Yahoo, and a lot of the recent work was supported by a semantic-search startup called Powerset. In fact, a quick look at the personnel on the project shows that it is dominated by people from those two companies.

Given that Yahoo is in turmoil, and has been showing some signs of reconsidering their search business, and given that Powerset was just bought by Microsoft, who likely already has its own infrastructure for these sorts of applications, I have to wonder what will happen with Hadoop.

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Bleh.

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We haven’t really used the feature, but I find the move baffling. One commentator suggested it was a move to boost revenue, because it might drive some users to create separate accounts.

That may well be, but in the process of doing so, Netflix is destroying the investment of any customers who made use of profiles and were in the habit of rating DVDs. Presumably these ratings will end up pooled for the whole account., which is likely to reduce the overall quality of ratings for each member of the household (imagine a mother who rented a couple of Kung Fu movies a month, and what will happen when that gets mixed in with the dozen of teen and action movies the rest of the household rents). It also seems to reduce the amount of aggregate information that their recommendation engine has to work with.

It’s puzzling why Netflix is willing to piss off its most dedicated users. Perhaps it is easier to do if they rent more disks and therefore drive up costs. It could also be that Netflix has concluded that the value of the ratings and recommendations is lower than many outsiders thought. It was assumed that users would be less likely to switch to another service because they were getting value from the recommendations derived from their ratings. In addition, new users would start to see immediate value for rating movies because of the vast store of ratings data from other users that Netflix had to work with.

I have to wonder if somehow it has something to do with their attempts to build a video on demand business.

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They.’ve recently addressed another issue. Roku has just released a $99 set top box that plays Netflix on demand. Netflix doesn’t have HD content (and I doubt that most people have internet connections that would be up to streamed HD), but the device is HD ready. I’ve been thinking of replacing the computer hooked to our TV with a smaller, more efficient device, but I’d been leaning back to using a computer so we could use netflix’s streaming. The Roku device solves that problem, but, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to play anything else. Too bad. I’d happily pay another $25-50 for something that would play content from a media server.

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