Brian explains why Half-Life 2 should be the game of the year (er, that is, last year).
Then, there’s the Havoc physics engine. My God, the Havoc physics engine. It is a thing of beauty to behold and to exploit with the gravity gun. There are also many areas that can only be passed through an understanding of physics, as well as several ancillary things that can only be obtained or reached through judicious use of the gravity gun and materials.
Christopher Baus: “I boldly predict that in one year Google will give up and ignore “nofollow” meta-data.” His argument, in a nutshell: “Link data is Google’s number one asset. Today they just admitted that asset isn’t as valuable as it used to be.” Bah. They admitted, instead, that the world has changed, and that A links-to B no longer strictly implies A endorses B.
Update: It seems that there’s a growing backlash against nofollow, claiming it damages the Web or PageRank doesn’t motivate spammers (+) or even that spammers don’t even bother with HREFs sometimes.
I guess my problem is that I keep viewing spammers as essentially rational (which they are) but I totally misapprehend the utility of their various strategies. (Can you tell I’m enrolled in a game theory course this semester?)
Update #2: Via Brad DeLong, an even-handed opinion by Chuq Von Rospach: “Why ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ isn’t the answer. Or is at best only a partial one.” In essence, not only is it free to comment-spam, but it’s also highly unlikely that weblog software will be updated to annotate untrusted links appropriately. I think I can get behind this viewpoint—it’s a great idea, a useful thing to add to our bag of WWW tricks, but it won’t eliminate comment spam tomorrow.
Ed Felten: My Morning Pick-Me-Up.
First thing this morning, I’m sitting in my bathrobe, scanning my inbox, when I’m jolted awake by the headline on a TechDirt story:
California Senator Wants to Throw Ed Felten in Jail
I guess I’ll take the time to read that story!
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