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… hot chicks will have sex with you. According to The Exile, this is a legit ad:

So my latest article was Dugg over 1800 times.

While this sounds awesome, the comments are absolutely worthless.

The users didn’t even call me names or insinuate that I sleep with rotting flesh.

In fact, they talk about everything I do not mention in the article wholly ignoring the substance of the actual piece.

Fact: I never once discuss broadband. So guess what they spend all of their time talking about?
Fact: I never mention broadband prices. Yet, the title of the Digg post suggests other wise.
Fact: I don’t compare ISPs or international policies. That doesn’t stop people from hearsay/conjecture.
Fact: I never mention Google or AT&T. Yet they are mentioned throughout the 350 comments.

Probably the funniest fact is that I never mention everyones favorite company, Google. I don’t even talk about the potential bidders in the upcoming 700 mhz auction. This absence was intentionally made, yet someone logged in and added the words “broadband” and “google” in the user-contributed tags on the actual article.

Perhaps the most disappointing thing for me, aside from not receiving any substantive critiques, is how neither of my previous articles on this subject matter were discussed or dugg. Both of them were arguably more interesting.

In fact, last week I published “Against a National Broadband Policy.” If that doesn’t deserved to be slimmed, what does?

The reason I mention this is because as an author/observer, I would like my mistakes corrected — I don’t think I’m perfect (unless it involves karaoke to Bon Jovi songs).

Perhaps next time I’ll include scantily clad images of Scarlett Johansson.

Note: two of my older stories were dugg and have at least a couple of insightful comments (1 2).

Via an IM from Michael Barnett. Yea, that Michael.

Over the last day a couple of friends sent me several interesting stories:

- The Great Firewall of China at Wired. A discussion on how censorship does and does not work in China.

- The most corrupt man in China at the Times Online. The story of Lai Changxing.

- Olympic Greed at U.S. News & World Report. How government corruption has manipulated the Beijing Olympic games of 2008. See also: Smog and Mirrors at Wired.

- Everlasting Run at ESPN. About streak runners, people that run everyday for decades. See also: ultramarathon runners overviewed in The Perfect Human also by Wired.

- The funeral is the cannonball run speed record. This past fall, both the NY Times and Wired magazine put together detailed articles on the most recent attempt at breaking it. And Alex Roy did.

Via Engadget.

Ever wonder what every Intel CPU looked like between the years of 1971 and 2007?

Here is the Intel 4004 processor from 1971:

It operated at 108 KHz, has 2,300 transistors and was fabbed at 10 microns (or 10,000 nm)

And this is latest Penryn model from this fall:

It operates at 3+ GHz, has 820,000,000 transistors and was fabbed at 45 nm (or .045 microns)

Thus, in less than 4 decades, chip frequency has increased 30,000x and transistor count has increased 350,000x. All of this was crammed into an area 222x smaller than the original 1971 base part.

As I stated in What is wrong with Moore’s Law, this is a good illustration of engineering innovation in the form of extreme miniaturization. These numbers alone do not prove that the processor is any better at calculating formulas or conducting any productive utility.

What fanboys should do is produce the following numbers for every Intel or AMD processor: Watts per MIPS and FLOPS. And take that and adjust the retail sale price (USD) for baseline inflation (1971).

Despite the steady decline in the value of a dollar, I suspect that the technical numbers have increased exponentially, just as the die-size has decreased geometrically.

See also:
So, you want to make a computer chip
What do Botnets and GPGPUs have in common?
GPU versatility
Seth Lloyd’s Million Megahertz CPU

ESPN put together a splendid group of curmudgeons regarding the latest BCS quagmire. I think that they do a near-perfect job explaining the problems and subsequent half-baked solutions:

See also:
The Bowl Championship Series: A Case Against Subjectively Aggregated Statistics
Bowl Chaos System Receives Sternest Reprimand Yet

Well, the most accurate one at least.

While you may have laughed at their daily news, their 13-word stereotypes of each country is no joking matter.

Exhibit A:

Be sure to check out the rest of the world, especially Europe.

While I typically like fighting against the tide, the consensus on Rotten Tomatoes is pretty definitive.

I too seconded the notion, that Tom Cruise’s “Lions for Lambs” sucks.