So very Old Europe, via the Telegraph:

French president Jacques Chirac yesterday pledged to help fund a new European internet search engine to rival Google and Yahoo as he railed against what he sees as the threat of Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism.

This is such a waste of French taxpayer money that it beggars belief that such an initiative would even be considered in the year 2005.

Perhaps after they’ve wasted the first billion Euros, they’ll decide to make it a "European Project"; you know, out of solidarity and all that.

What a truly fine example of Old Europe at work: state subsidies going to giant industrial companies to fund projects based on a delusional worldview.

Idiots. The whole of Google was created for $30 million, and self-funded afterwards by advertisers. Why is Old Europe so against bottom-up, entrepreneurial, for-profit ventures like this? It’s clearly a more efficient and rapid way to innovate, create good, sustainable jobs, and increase a taxable base.

If tomorrow a venture capital firm announced it was investing up to $2 billion in a startup to compete with Google, and doing so on the basis that the world wants more cultural diversity than what Google is offering, that firm would be mocked universally for its stupidity.

Well, what does Jacques Chirac care? It’s not his money, anyway.

Coverage of the Pastafarianism, or the worship-cult of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, is reaching fever pitch.

FSM has been written about all over the blogosphere, and has now penetrated the Mainstream Media with an article in the NYTimes.

When I first blogged about His Noodliness, the FSM’s original website was getting 200k page views per day. According to this article below, it’s now getting 2 million per day.

Check out BoingBoing.net for lots of coverage, photos, and jokes (ahem, I mean sermons and theological postulating) about Pastafarianism.

My favourite: at the end of a prayer, Pastafarians say, "Ramen", instead of "Amen". Brilliant.

Link: The Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon, USA.

Notice all the attention the past few years on oil as a key strategic asset in the world economy.

But has anyone projected what would happen if the world supply of computers just stopped overnight? I was very surprised to read this statistic:

83% of notebooks sold in 2005 are made in Taiwan

Unlike oil, we keep no inventory of computers. What would happen if a freak event occured in which a conflict in Taiwan destroyed its capacity to produce computers?

I wonder if the US would actually defend Taiwan more ferociously than it did Kuwait in 1990-91?

Is this Taiwan’s insurance policy against being invaded, to be a near-monopoly producer of an essential global economic “raw material”?

Can I call this the “Kuwait Strategy” of sovereign self-preservation? Has anybody researched this already?

Link: � 83% of notebooks sold in 2005 are made in Taiwan | IT Facts — Your Daily Research Synopsis | ZDNet.com.

The amazing people at PaidContent.org dig up info on what is likely to be the iTunes phone launch next week.

So it turns out that the phone is likely to be restricted to 25 songs, which is pretty pathetic. Apparently, this restriction is by design, as the phone is capable of holding many more songs than this.

*If* this rumour is true, then it has Telco fingerprints all over it. Nobody at Motorola or Apple would be so stupid as to cripple a device this way.

…when Americans can get their fill of religious extremism right at home!

I know this is just a tiny group of crazy people, but it makes the whole of religious America look bad.

Hat tip to David Galbraith for spotting these loonies:

"ChristianExodus.org is coordinating the move of thousands of
Christians to South Carolina for the express purpose of re-establishing
Godly, constitutional government… The time has come for Christians to
withdraw our consent from the current federal government and
re-introduce the Christian principles once so predominant in America to
a sovereign State like South Carolina."

A new study by a Spanish property association (FMAIM) shows that, not surprisingly, London has the most expensive rent among major European cities. More surpising, is that Madrid now has the 5th most expensive rent in Europe!

The top cities are:

1. London (35 Euros/m2/month – ouch!!)
2. Rome (21.7)
3. Paris (19.8)
4. Geneva (19.4)
5. Madrid (16)

Then there’s the 10-15 Euros/m2/month bracket:

- Barcelona, Amsterdam, Zurich, Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich

And the under 10 Euros/m2/month bracket:

- Stockholm, Amsterdam, Brussels.

I think this list leaves out many cities- would be interesting to get a much more detailed view, also with some sense of tendency over time.

But I’m surprised by the rent levels in Madrid being so high, particularly when you know what average salary levels are like there.

Link: Noticias detalladas.

A riff on the Dodgeball and Hot or Not concepts, Gahbunga is a new SMS service that works like this: go on a date, take a cameraphone picture of your date and send it to Gahbunga, who in turn send it to all your friends for them to rate your date. Before the date is over you get back a message with the summary of your friends’ opinions.

Will this work? I don’t know. I have to admit, when I was in NY late last year and first heard about Dodgeball, I didn’t "get it" (until Google acquired them, that is!).

But I’m not sure I’d want to be the guy taking a picture of his date, I don’t think I’d really care to get real-time pictures of my friends’ dates to give feedback, and I’m not sure about having my picture taken by a date, knowing I was going to be rated by all her friends right then and there…

Link: Gahbunga!.

Last week, a "perfect storm" of IT irritations/failures led me to have to buy a new PC and assorted accessories. I now see light at the end of the tunnel, and if all goes well, I should be able to get back to work.

Rather than review the gory details of everything that went wrong, here are some of the lessons learned:

• Google rocks. Maybe stating the obvious, but one can really learn a lot by tapping into the experience of others that is available online. If you’ve had a computer problem, chances are someone else has also had it and had it solved, and the whole conversation has been indexed by Google.
• Acer is bad. I bought an Acer PC in Spain and found it impossible to upgrade to an english version of XP; everything crashed nonstop, the documentation in the box and online was laughably bad, and online forums seemed full of people complaining about Acer problems. I spent 10 hours trying to get around these problems before simply giving up and returning the machine. Acer customer support was open only in restricted business hours, too. It was annoying, because the Acer value for money was pretty good and I liked the look and noise level of the box. Oh, well.
• Media Markt is great! Value for money was insanely good when buying a PC made under their own brand "microstar". The box won’t win any design awards, but the components are first-rate and everything worked perfectly from the start (including my upgrade to XP in english and reinstallation of drivers). The reference instructions in the box were great, and even the way files were organized on the hard drive were super logical and easy to follow. Excellent service guarantees and money-back policies. Respect to Germany!
• PC City is ok. They get my respect for offering a very easy return policy, but the salemanship isn’t very good, and the quality of the products fairly dubious. Lot’s of crummy low-spec accessories and PCs on offer.
• Don’t ever buy IT equipment from a Spanish, or worse- Catalan, owned business. I’m not sure why this is, but the state of retail marketing in Spain is about 20-30 years behind the US/UK, particularly in money-back guarantees and return policies. I’ve returned goods that were defective and had to argue about it, been made to feel like I was cheating the store, and literally scolded on my attitude for thinking I could dare to return items. I have in the past had almost hilarious converstations with local shop owners in Barcelona who simply don’t believe me when I tell them the kind of return policies that are normal in the US/UK. Whatever…I don’t even bother anymore- I simply buy from other places, which in Spain means buying from foreign-owned chains like PC City or Media Markt.

Link: Media Markt Europe.