Sarkozy elected President of France

Well, in what (I believe) NPR called the highest french voter turnout ever, voters have elected conservative Nicolas Sarkozy as President over Segolene Royal. He is expected to push for reforms that would push France towards a more US/UK-style of social and economic policies to help increase French growth and employment.

Kos luminary Jerome a Paris isn't completely convinced. Further, he again argues compellingly that, contrary to the standard line in most economic reporting, the economies of the US and UK aren't necessarily superior to that of France.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Van Johnson on the Future of Content Networking

This is already a bit old, but I was just alerted to it via slashdot.

Van Johnson, one of the people responsible for building computer networking as we know it today, gives a lecture at Google summarizing how we got to Web 2.0 and proposing where we need to go from here. His basic premise is that we're currently at a "Coppernican Revolution" moment in terms of content delivery, similar to where we were in the 60s and 70s when they were working on what would become the Intertubes as we know them today...and suggests that we need to change the way we think about networking.

He suggests that the biggest problem with networking as we have it today is that it is still fundamentally too "conversation-based", which worked fine for the pre-commercial academic/military/research networks for which it was designed, but in our emerging ubiquitous computing world, it needs to be more "data-centric".

For those who care it's well worth watching.

Huge in Korea

So my regular reader knows that I've been perplexed by my inexplicable traffic resulting from searches on "tiananmen square", we now have chapter 2 of the story. (Sidenote: I've still never managed to find this blog when searching on any of these terms, which is one of my key sources of perplexity)

The (apparently) Korean search engine naver.com seems to be sending a lot of traffic my way on searches for "Gorillaz".

To this I say: "Huttah!", and further... 환영, 나의 한국 친구

(This is likely one of those cases where babelfish totally screws up and that text manages to be some Korean insult.)

4/29truth.com - don't believe the hype

Unlike the situation on 9/11, we now know how to evaluate gas-fire-related structural collapses. As such, we now have a site devoted to debunking the "official story" on the so-called *accidental* collapse of the overpass leading to the Bay Bridge, only days after the actual event.

Was it Liberals? Or the Jews? Or perhaps George Soros, even?

I'm sure this site will get beyond the *official story* in no time.

Johnathan Coulton - First of May

exitramp's favorite musician, Johanathan Coulton, has new (?) a song appropriate for MayDay. He maintains and/or exceeds most favored musician status with this one.

Link. (Definitely NSFW.)

Ah, spring...