More trouble for the coalition tonight as pictures emerge showing British troops beating a prisoner with rifle butts and then urinating on him.
This does not look like the best PR for the coalition, after the 60 minutes program showing US troops involved in plainly sick behaviour. If I was an Iraqi I would be getting seriously pissed off. No, that pun is not intended.
This is one of the most curious things I have ever read -
Everyone should have a read – what are these guys up to?
Google’s SEC Filing.
Here is an exerpt from this very unusual filing:
DON’T BE EVIL
Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served as shareholders and in all other ways by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.
Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others. Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating. We also display advertising, which we work hard to make relevant, and we label it clearly. This is similar to a newspaper, where the advertisements are clear and the articles are not influenced by the advertisers payments. We believe it is important for everyone to have access to the best information and research, not only to the information people pay for you to see.
MAKING THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE
We aspire to make Google an institution that makes the world a better place. With our products, Google connects people and information all around the world for free. We are adding other powerful services such as Gmail that provides an efficient one gigabyte Gmail account for free. By releasing services for free, we hope to help bridge the digital divide. AdWords connects users and advertisers efficiently, helping both. AdSense helps fund a huge variety of online web sites and enables authors who could not otherwise publish. Last year we created Google Grants a growing program in which hundreds of non-profits addressing issues, including the environment, poverty and human rights, receive free advertising. And now, we are in the process of establishing the Google Foundation. We intend to contribute significant resources to the foundation, including employee time and approximately 1% of Google’s equity and profits in some form. We hope someday this institution may eclipse Google itself in terms of overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world’s problems.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
Google is not a conventional company. Eric, Sergey and I intend to operate Google differently, applying the values it has developed as a private company to its future as a public company. Our mission and business description are available in the rest of the prospectus; we encourage you to carefully read this information. We will optimize for the long term rather than trying to produce smooth earnings for each quarter. We will support selected high-risk, high-reward projects and manage our portfolio of projects. We will run the company collaboratively with Eric, our CEO, as a team of three. We are conscious of our duty as fiduciaries for our shareholders, and we will fulfill those responsibilities. We will continue to attract creative, committed new employees, and we will welcome support from new shareholders. We will live up to our don’t be evil principle by keeping user trust and not accepting payment for search results. We have a dual-class structure that is biased toward stability and independence and that requires investors to bet on the team, especially Sergey and me.
In this letter we have explained our thinking on why Google is better off going public. We have talked about our IPO auction method and our desire for stability and access for all investors. We have discussed our goal to have investors who determine a rational price and invest for the long term only if they can buy at that price. Finally, we have discussed our desire to create an ideal working environment that will ultimately drive the success of Google by retaining and attracting talented Googlers.
We have tried hard to anticipate your questions. It will be difficult for us to respond to them given legal constraints during our offering process. We look forward to a long and hopefully prosperous relationship with you, our new investors. We wrote this letter to help you understand our company.
The guys over at a Fistful of euros have added me to their blogroll, not sure how that happened. I have noticed people visiting from one of their other sites, Living in Europe aggregator. I shall have to reciprocate, and read them more often.
On another note this has been my busiest month since I started blogging, and that includes the month of the John Gray saga. According to Sitemeter my total for the month of April will stand at about 26,000 visitors/35,000 page views. Average is now 1,000 visitors a day, while webalizer is saying im getting in around 1800 visitors a day.
I’m not quite sure why this is, but my server is chewing up about 5GB a month.
All very interesting this visitor dynamics.
American comedian, but Irish resident, Des Bishop has a blog. I think he might need some help adding in some links to other blogs – and maybe a comments option rather than having to register for the forum. No email address either that I can see. And no Sitemeter…
Anyways by linking to him now it will help his Google rank as at present googling his name won’t bring up his site. I wonder how high I will rank now that I have used his name as a heading.
What a great day, to my absolute surprise the Commission on Electronic Voting has decided that the system is not reliable or secure. Martin Cullen featured on the News At One, and refused to resign over the issue. He brands himself an ‘innovator’ and tries to spin it so the whole thing does not sound like a mess.
In reality it demonstrates the sheer incompetence, arrogance and stupidity of the Fianna Fail/PD government.
I am delighted, and oh look the Electronic Voting website is down.
Great. Read the full report here.
Update: Wohoo! It’s been Slashdotted.
One of the most interesting pieces I’ve read on the subject this year – the apparent lack of interest in the US at the EU’s impending expansion.
It is a significant development in global affairs – the EU will be a bloc with a population of almost half a billion people, bordering countries such as Ukraine, Belarus and more importantly Russia, for the first time.
It is curious that Americans can’t understand why we have not let in Turkey yet – it is something of an inevitable fact that someday soon Turkey will have to join, as far as I can see any form of European growth could not be sustained without the workers needed from such a populous country as Turkey.
Here’s the full text:
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Well it has finally been announced, Google are floating.
Here is my prediction:
Hype and more hype, within 2 years the market will have changed entirely – and Google will be another player in a hugely competitive market. I can see its share value staying high for a while, but if it stays high too long it will be down to dotcom sentiment rather than sensible economics.
« 6 In The Morning »
You could hardly be indifferent to D12’s « 6 In The Morning ». The D12 soldiers are ready to fight, more offensive than ever. Eminem introduces the song and he is determined more than ever to puch his assaillants’ face with his powerful words.
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Guess who’s back ? D12 is back with a brand new album. An album that differs from « Devil’s Night » and that may surprise some D12 fans.
Of course, it is still offensive, thug styled with the well known Detroit underground flavor, but there is less « beef » inside than in the former album.
The most amazing tracks of the album are certainly « Git Up », « 40 Oz », « 6 In The Morning », « American Psycho II » and « Good Die Young ».
The album may surprise you, but it won’t disappoint you . « D12 World » is supposed to be the second part of « Devil’s Night ».
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D12′s New Album Out Tuesday
(LAUNCH, 04/26/2004 3:00 PM)
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Matthew Yglesias with an interesting presentation from the CPA.
Also note that the vast majority of Iraqi police are untrained. Not as in they went through the training program and it’s no good. They just didn’t get trained. At all.
Hm.
Kevin Drum quoting Eric Alterman in the Nation…
That’s too bad, because unfortunately Cheney is nuts. As Powell puts it, Cheney was in the grip of a “fever,” no longer the “steady, unemotional rock that he had witnessed a dozen years earlier during the run-up to the Gulf War. The vice president was beyond hell-bent for action against Saddam. It was as if nothing else existed.” Woodward gives us the backstory: Cheney, confirmed by his equally fevered aide “Scooter” Libby, repeatedly pitched–as he does today–the apparently imaginary meeting between Mohamed Atta and Iraqi intelligence in Prague. Powell/Woodward aptly term this contention “worse than ridiculous.” It goes on. “Cheney would take an intercept and say it shows something was happening. No, no, no, Powell or another would say, it shows that somebody talked to somebody else who said something might be happening. A conversation would suggest something might be happening, and Cheney would convert that into a ‘We know.’”
The other lesson here is the way independent news operations like the Memory Hole are helping to reshape journalism. The little guy, in using the Freedom of Information Act, did something that most of the established media didn’t bother to try.
A blistering attack on Blair and his foreign policy.
The virtually unprecedented letter criticises the prime minister for claiming influence over the US president, George Bush, and American policy, then backing the Israel policy when it was already “doomed to failure”.
“We feel the time has come to make our anxieties public, in the hope that they will be addressed in parliament and will lead to a fundamental reassessment,” the letter said.
Tom hopes that everybody will be voting Yes to the European constitution referendum in the UK. I for one will be voting No in the referendum here, that is of course if we have one. And I guess it won’t make a difference either, since we will just keep having referenda until its pushed through.
Roy Hattersley disagrees with me.