Xight notes a Gizmodo story that is a few days old but hasn't gotten a lot of play. It seems that Nigeria recently denied Bill Gates a visa to travel there on his recent trip to Africa. The initial denial was "on the premise that they required proof he would not reside in Nigeria indefinitely, causing a strain on social services and a general nuisance for immigration." The comments to the post are worth reading too.

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Another topic Scoble and I talked about today was Facebook. I said I don't like Facebook, never have, and I finally figured out why.

It's another one of those user generated content things, only this time I'm building up an address book that I can look at, but can only do things with it that Facebook lets me do.

Why exactly do I need Facebook to get inbetween me and my address book?

I mean, I understand why they want me to tell them everyone I know, but how about letting me download a copy to my computer, so I can back it up, use it on my iPhone or Blackberry, bequeath it to my heirs, write a book about it, or give a copy to Google or Netflix or Yahoo, or you get the idea.

It's the last thing they don't want me to do, give a copy to a competitor of theirs. And they hope I won't notice that I'm doing all this work and not insisting on at least being their equal when it comes to my data.

Sometime in November Google is rumored to be revealing their answer to Facebook. Whatever it is it will surely have an API, and will allow Google apps to share the info, and it will, if it hopes to compete with Facebook, provide some access to this data to app developers. But the true measure of their gravitas will be whether they give full control of the user's data to the user. If they do that, no matter what's missing from their software, it won't suck.

PS: When I write about it, I do it crudely, saying they suck or don't. When Doc Searls writes about it he calls it Vendor Relationship Management. Doc writes so elegantly because he is a research fellow at Harvard University.

The Washington Post has an article detailing what is known of the workings of the Russian Business Network, a shadowy entity based in St. Petersburg that hosts a good fraction of the world's spammers, identity thieves, bot herders, and phishers. RBN is not incorporated anywhere and may not technically even be violating Russian law. It provides "bulletproof hosting" for about $600 a month to a wide range of bad guys.The author of the Post story, Brian Krebs, supplements it with two blog posts. One provides more detail and back story including a look at one ISP's security admin who decided last summer to ban all RBN traffic from his network, with outstanding results. The other post maps some of the RBN's upstream suppliers and details the extent of the RBN's involvement in recent cyber-attacks: "Nearly every major advancement in computer viruses or worms over the past two years has emanated from or sent stolen consumer data back to servers" in the RBN.

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goldcd writes " A while back I wrote some pretty reasonable forum code, a PHPBB alternative. A few years down the line it's pretty stable, I've stopped tinkering with it, and it's standing up by itself. I have neither the time, inclination, nor inspiration to do anything more with it, but would very much like to give the code to the world to use and expand upon. Now I could just upload it as it is onto SourceForge, but currently it's very specific in its usage and I'd be ashamed of what 'proper' coders would think of my amateur offering — I'm afraid it would be laughed at and ignored. On the other hand, I don't want to waste hours of my own time perfecting it for people just to 'rip off' as is, and never contribute anything. My question is, what do you have to do to make your code 'OSS appealing?'"

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First things first. Thank you to everyone who voted for kym and I and kept us alive this past week. I knew the Jive would be tough on me and it was. It was the first dance where I botched a step and it showed. One portion of it i was supposed to hesitate a beat and I didnt, throwing us off as we circled. We were able to come back together and get back on beat, but the judges definitely noticed it and docked me points. Thats the challenge of live TV. Its also going to motivate me to work even harder on my waltz this week.

The waltz is all about posture. This week we have a great song. Even better its a song that isnt one I would normally sing along to. So it should be much easier to just put on my "dance face" and find "my inner dancer"...Hopefully :)

Practice has been going well this week. We head back to LA on Sunday after practicing 6 hours a day this week.

Learning a new dance is an emotional rollercoaster. Yes, practicing all that time can be tiring. My legs hurt and if the schedule creates a situation where we practice till past midnight and then start again at 9am the next morning, to say my legs get sore , wouldnt quite do it justice.

I didnt know what the Viennese Waltz was. Heck, i didnt know there were different types of waltzs. So trying to pick up the steps, the turns, the posture was the first step. Next came actually learning the routine Kym put together for us. As with the jive, when I first start learing the routine, there is always something that seems impossible for me to learn. Kym will show me the step. I will try it. Then we do it over and over and over again. Some steps come easily. Others, not so much.

This week there was a promenade travel. It required about 24 steps in combination at full speed. Literally I felt like I was running to cover the distance we needed to cover and to make the beats work. Im a tech guy, so I tend to look at the steps as a sequence of instructions, which I write down and try to learn by looking and doing. Its not unusual for me to have a piece of paper in my hand with the steps and directions on them as I learn a step. My approach wasn't working. It was just too fast for me to process and translate to my feet.

Because I wasnt making any progress on these, Kym decided we needed to move on to work on a different part of the routine. Something called "Naturals" . Much easier for me. More like a 3 count waltz step. We practiced over and over and then as we tried to improve on it, it dawned on me that these "Naturals" steps were similar to the Promenades . The steps were the same, but the changes of directions were more extreme and the pace and distance were faster and longer. Of course I thought I had just found the solution to all my problems and told Kym about my breakthrough. AT which point all she could do was laugh at me and tell me that she had been trying to tell me that the Promenade and the Naturals were very similar and I just had to learn one to get the other.

Who knew ?

Its the breakthrough like this one that all of the sudden re energizes our practices and pumps up my confidence. One day i feel like Im never going to learn this thing and the next, Im looking back at the "impossible", thinking its easy.

Thats the first hill of the dancing with the stars rollercoaster. The 2nd is actually doing it live, and the 3rd of course is waiting on Tuesday to find out if all of you have voted for me.

I promise that I am working hard for you. Thank you to all of you who have voted by phone, by email and bigger thanks to all of you who have sent emails, forwarded emails and called friends, family and co workers asking them to vote by phone and email. The stories and feedback I have gotten are amazing !!

What ever success I have on the show is all thanks to each of you !

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theodp sends a follow-up to the discussion here a couple of months back about Indiana University librarians and students being forced to use the 'human-powered' ChaCha search engine because IU's President and one of its Trustees were business buddies of ChaCha CEO (and IU alum) Scott Jones. Don't be ridiculous, insisted indignant IU officials. It was ChaCha's ability to fill in gaps in a speech he was writing in 2007 that convinced IU's CIO that the University had to do a deal with ChaCha. What a coincidence, notes Valleywag. The need to fill in gaps in a speech he was writing back in 2005 is what convinced ChaCha CEO Jones that he had to create ChaCha in the first place. Way to anticipate what your customers need before they do.

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Whip-hero writes in with an Examiner.com story about Google's rejection of an ad critical of MoveOn.org. The story rehashes the controversy over MoveOn.org's ad that ran in the NYTimes on the first day of testimony of Gen. Petraeus's Senate testimony. The rejected ad was submitted on behalf of Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins — its text is reproduced in the article. The implication, which has been picked up by many blogs on the other side of the spectrum from MoveOn.org, is that Google acted out of political favoritism. Not so, says Google's policy counsel: Google's trademark policy allows any trademark holder to request that its marks not be used in ads; and MoveOn.org had made such a request.

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BB reader Sarah says,

Roy Rosenzweig, founder of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, died on October 11, 2007. He was a pioneer in digital history and pushed for open access and for use of digital material in historical scholarship.

Link to Washington Post obit. More here. Image: Jon Goell -- Gmu Center For History And New Media.

Hot Toddy sends in a link to a story up on Digital World Tokyo about a more efficient process for manufacturing solar cells. It involves dropping molten silicon from a height of 14 m; surface tension causes tiny spheres 1 mm in diameter to form; the silicon crystallizes in the 1.5 seconds of free-fall. The spheres can be mounted on surfaces of any shape. They capture light from many directions, increasing their solar efficiency. Kyosemi is the company behind the Sphelar technology. Some of the pages on this site date to 2003 and the status of most listed Sphelar products is either "under development" or "engineering sample is available."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MojoKid writes "Though many leaks of the product have been circulating for some time, Intel officially took the wraps off and launched their new X38 Express chipset for the high-end desktop motherboard market. With this launch, the Intel desktop chipset line-up gets a new flagship. Intel's new X38 chipset encompasses all of the technology advances that have made the P35 a success and adds a slew of new features designed to increase memory and graphics subsystem performance, like PCI Express 2.0 SerDes and Intel Extreme Memory technology in the new X38 MCH. The Asus motherboard tested by HotHardware even features an embedded Linux-based OS that boots in a matter a seconds."

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Kaseijin writes "Florida Governor Charlie Crist is getting his wish. The New York Times reports the state will replace touch-screen voting machines with optical-scan models by July 1, 2008 — the most aggressive timetable of any jurisdiciton rethinking this approach to voting. The touch-screen machines most likely will be sold to other jurisdictions or stripped for parts."

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Bowman9991 writes "A new promotional website is up and trailers for Blade Runner: The Final Cut have been released. I've been waiting ages for this one. SFFMedia has some details about the Blade Runner Ultimate Collector's Edition on HD-DVD and Blu-ray with new footage. It's slated for a December 18th release. Apparently it's also being released in the cinemas again in the US."

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thefickler writes "Dissatisfaction with Windows Vista seems to be swelling, with the Dutch Consumers' Union (Consumentenbond) asking Microsoft to supply unhappy Vista users with a free copy of Windows XP. Not surprisingly, Microsoft refused. This prompted Consumentenbond to advise consumers to ask for XP, rather than Vista, when buying a new computer."

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An anonymous reader writes "MSNBC has an article on the impending robo-human coupling: 'My forecast is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots,' artificial intelligence researcher David Levy at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands told LiveScience."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Matt sez, "Cool arts and culture site Dark Roasted Blend offers this exclusive interview with New Weird fantasy author Jeff VanderMeer. The article is accompanied by about a dozen of the weirdest illustrations culled from Jeff's books and stories."

New Weird is a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts the romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy, largely by choosing realistic, complex real-world models. It creates settings that may combine elements of both science fiction and fantasy. New Weird has a visceral, in-the-moment quality that often uses elements of surreal or transgressive horror for its tone, style, and effects - in combination with the stimulus of influence from New Wave writers or their proxies (including also such forebears as Mervyn Peake and the French/English Decadents).

New Weird fictions are acutely aware of the modern world, even if in disguise, but not always overtly political. As part of this awareness of the modern world, New Weird relies for its visionary power on a "surrender to the weird" that isn't, for example, hermetically sealed in a haunted house on the moors or in a cave in Antarctica. The "surrender" (or "belief") of the writer can take many forms, some of them even involving the use of postmodern techniques that do not undermine the surface reality of the text.

Link (Thanks, Matt!)

(Image credit: Back cover of Vandermeer's book The Situation, by Scott Eagle)

See also:
Urban spaces and sf: interview with Jeff VanderMeer
Economics in fiction with Stross, VanderMeer, et al
Photos of you acting dead needed for indie film
Thackery T. Lambshead Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases

An anonymous reader writes "Google claims that people are devouring capacity with photos and other attachments on its Gmail e-mail service faster than the company can add to it at its current pace. So Google said on Friday that it would increase the rate at which it is adding capacity to its web-based service. There's only one problem, Google's main competitors — Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo Mail — far surpassed Gmail this year with their own capacity."

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Alienkillerrace writes "Linux.com has reviewed the brand new release of Alien Arena 2007, giving it a glowing review. 'New Alien Arena 6.10 blows away its FPS competition' claims that Alien Arena is now the very best of the freeware FPS games, surpassing even Tremulous."

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A discussion thread on using shipping containers as housing on Making Light turned up a fantastic wealth of material on the subject (it turns out that the world's imbalance of trade with China means that most ports have mountains of abandoned containers originating in China that no one wants to ship back there). Teresa Nielsen Hayden (who doubles as Boing Boing's comment-moderator) did a round-up post organzing dozens of links them